South Carolina rapper Danny Swain shoots clever satiric spitballs from the hip-hop margins. On "Shit Starters," from his debut album for Questlove's Okayplayer label, he does a mock Rick Ross flow over a Timbaland influenced groove: "I'm Seinfeld/Larry David/This beat I made sounds very dated." But eighty minutes of gripes about label persecution and insufficiently positive reviews feels like celeb whining from someone who isn’t famous.

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“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.